The Road to Damascus (bolo)

by John Ringo

  Not when she had spent her whole life believing in POPPA.

  Simon wrapped an arm very gently around his distraught daughter and guided her out of the terminal. She said nothing as they climbed into his ground car. She said nothing as he drove them home. From what he could tell, she wasn’t even paying attention to the city. They were nearly to the apartment before she broke her long silence.

  “Daddy?” Her voice was a mere whisper.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t expect you to believe that. I wouldn’t, if I were you. But I am.” A single tear rolled down her cheek. “And I’ll try to prove it.”

  He reached across and squeezed her hand. “I love you, Yalena.”

  Another tear appeared, trembled on the edge for a moment, then slid down her face. “I don’t know why.”

  “Try to take it on faith for a bit.”

  She nodded. “Okay.” Then she touched the flowers she still carried. “These are beautiful.”

  “I’m glad you like them.” He managed a smile. “It’s an old custom, from Terra. A Russian custom. Always greet people you love with flowers, when they’ve been gone for a long time.”

  Droplets that were not rain fell onto the petals in her lap. “I don’t know anything about Russia. I don’t know much about anything else, either,” she added bitterly. “On the Star of Mali, I tried to use some of the library files, but I couldn’t make sense of them. I didn’t know enough to make sense of them. I kept having to stop and look things up, until I got totally lost, trying to find meanings for the things that would tell me what something else meant. I never got all the way though any of them. And I tried, really hard. I hate POPPA!” she added with a savage sob in her voice.

  “It’s going to be rough, I know that,” Simon said gently. “But you’ll have help. I’ve nothing better to do with my time, for one thing. And Vishnu’s school system has set up special classes for refugees coming in from Jefferson. The principal told me about the program yesterday, when I made arrangements for you to start classes next week. It will take hard work, a lot of it. But you can do it. Try to have faith in that, too.”

  “Okay,” she whispered again.

  She said very little for the rest of the day and went to bed very early, pleading exhaustion. Simon closed her bedroom door softly, wishing she were little enough to rock to sleep, and made his way into his own room. He had his daughter back. A piece of her, anyway. He was grateful for that much. But he could not stop thinking about Kafari and the war she planned to wage. She was getting ready to fight a dangerous enemy and he wasn’t thinking about POPPA. He was thinking about the machine he had once called friend. If Sonny killed Kafari…

  Then Simon would kill Sonny.

  It was as simple — and serious — as that.

  PART FOUR

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  I

  Yalena was not the most popular girl in school.

  In fact, there was ample evidence to show that she was the most unpopular. There were no students from Vishnu in Yalena’s classes, which were special affairs designed to teach Jeffersonian children remedial everything. The closest she came to natives of Vishnu during school hours were the hectic moments in the corridors while changing classes and standing in line at the school cafeteria. Most of the Vishnu kids turned pitying glances on those known to be from Jefferson, but others were openly rude.

  Given the way children of POPPA’s social and political elite behaved in mixed company, it was not difficult to see why. Yalena had truly not realized how odious a child she had been, until thrown into a society comprised of Vishnunians, POPPA’s upper crust, and Granger refugees.

  Since Yalena did not fit into any of those social groupings, was trusted by none of them, and did not seek out companionship from any of them, she was quite literally the least popular individual in the entire school. For the first year, it had cut her to the bone. By the time she was sixteen, it had left her in tears on occasions that should have been special and had, instead, been merely excruciating. At seventeen and a half, she was far too busy mapping out her vengeance to bother with mere social trivialities.

  She had her eye on college, which was more than enough work for a girl who hadn’t really learned anything but how to wash and dress herself. Fortunately, Vishnu’s colleges and universities had also opened their doors to Jefferson’s disadvantaged students, in a bid to create interstellar neighbors who were at least capable of reading, writing, and calculating basic arithmetic. Yalena had already applied to the college she wanted to attend, which offered the kind of classes she would need if she hoped to return home, someday, and strike back at the people who had murdered her mother and crippled her father.

  Yalena’s pulse always stuttered a little, when her thoughts turned to her father. Simon Khrustinov was not an easy person to know. He had given her the things she had asked for, to the best of his ability. She had not asked for all that much, in any case, preferring to test out a new concept called self-sufficiency. Her days of demanding — or even whining — were long since over. Mostly she had asked his advice. And that, he had given unstintingly.

  When the final bell rang, dismissing school for the day, Yalena gathered up her materials and stuffed them into her satchel, then headed into the crowded hallway. The swirl of happy voices, laughter, and slamming locker doors crested and splashed against her senses like whitewater on the Kirati River, where Yalena had done a whole summer of extreme camping. She had asked her father to send her there as her sixteenth birthday present.

  He’d held her eyes for long moments, looking so deeply into her soul, for the motives hidden there, that she’d actually started to tremble. Then he’d given himself a little shake, smiled with a look of pain far back in his eyes, and said, “Of course you can go. If you need any advice on what to take with you, just ask.”

  She’d asked. And had benefitted immensely from that advice. Yalena had enjoyed that summer, in a grim and solitary fashion. She hadn’t won herself any friends — mostly because she made no overtures, being far too busy learning simple survival skills most kids on Vishnu had absorbed by their sixth or seventh birthdays — but she’d won the grudging respect of the instructors.

  More importantly, she had proved to herself that she could, given sufficient determination, overcome a decade and a half of indoctrination into the art and science of lunacy, a handicap compounded by indolent living, lazy flab in every muscle in her body and every snyapse in her brain. She’d had to overcome a learned helplessness, as well, that vanished entirely within two days of her arrival at the wilderness area that served as campground.

  She’d spent her seventeenth summer in a Concordiat Officer Recruitment Program for high-school students interested in military careers. When she’d told him she planned to enroll, her father’s advice had been enormously useful.

  “The one thing you must understand,” he’d told her the night she’d broached the subject, “is the purpose of that training. You’ve done a fair bit of homework, that’s clear from what you’ve said. So tell me. What do you think C.O.R.P.’s purpose is?”

  She considered her words carefully. “To weed men from whiny boys and women from snivelly girls, for one. To provide the Concordiat with a cadre of trained officers for the combat arms. And to begin training on high-tech military equipment, which takes time. A lot of time.”

  Her father nodded. “Yes, those are all useful adjuncts to the C.O.R.P. program.”

  “But not the main reason?”

  “No.” He refilled his glass, swirled the ice cubes for a few moments, watching the patterns they made in the liquid. “Combat,” he said softly, “has a nasty habit of putting you under the kind of stress that breaks people apart from the inside. Your whole world is shattering around you and you know that your decisions and your actions — right or wrong — will not only affect your own life, but those of others. Not just other soldiers, but civilians in harm’s way, which is worse.”

  He fell sile
nt again, for long moments. She waited him out. He didn’t often let her see this part of his life and she wanted to understand him, wanted to understand what had made him the kind of person he was. She didn’t want to interrupt or distract him, when he was finally speaking of it.

  “When the stink and horror of it is all around you,” he finally said, voice low and harsh, “when people are dying on all sides, when you want — need, in fact — to run gibbering for the deepest hole you can find, that is precisely the time you must be at your clear-minded best. The Concordiat needs to know if you’re the kind of person who can go into a situation that would reduce most people to hysterical panic and make rational military decisions — and carry them out, which is even more important. Are you cool enough under extreme physical and emotional stress to know what must be done? Are you strong enough to do it, no matter the cost? That’s what C.O.R.P.’s main purpose is.”

  Yalena could see the shadows of memory in his eyes. She’d signed onto Vishnu’s datanet with the new computer her father had bought her, the week of her arrival, and had looked up Etaine in Vishnu’s historical archives. What she had read over the course of the next two deeply shocked hours had deepened Yalena’s hatred of school teachers who had systematically lied to her and her classmates. Those lies had poisoned her relationship with a man who should have been canonized as somebody’s patron saint.

  She knew that her father didn’t want her to walk into the mouth of hell, didn’t want her to face what he had faced and fought and lived through. Didn’t want to see shadows in her eyes — or a medallion of honor that meant he would never see her eyes again. Yet he gave her expert advice, steered her toward resources she would need, even gave her extra training, himself. He was, Yalena had finally understood, trying to give her enough of an edge to survive the course she had set herself upon and seemed to know, without words spoken, that she did not intend to enter the War College at Sector Command.

  Not until other, more important business had been taken care of, first.

  Yalena stopped at her locker and put away the satchel and sundry items she wouldn’t need for another ninety minutes, then headed for the C.O.R.P. practice field, behind the school’s sports complex. They’d been studying aikido and other martial arts, this semester, and she was looking forward to another good sparring session. The open field behind the school, used for track meets, was crowded with runners doing laps in the chilly autumn air. The crisp temperature and keen, biting wind spurred the runners to greater exertion, to keep warm. Yalena detoured around the end of the track, then ducked into the gymnasium, since walking through was faster than walking the long way around to reach the C.O.R.P. field.

  The smell of chlorine from the gymnasium’s basement-level pool mingled with the odors of body sweat, dirty socks, and talc from the various athletes working out on gymnastics equipment, running wind-sprints up and down the bleachers, and playing a fiercely competitive game that involved twenty sweating boys, an inflatable ball, and hoops dangling from various places on walls and ceilings.

  Yalena had even less in common with the school’s athletes than she did with the ordinary students. They, in turn, tended to regard her as something of a freak, mostly because she refused to accord them the adoration they seemed to think was owed them for the superior manner in which they could make balls go through hoops. Yalena crossed the gym in silence, ignoring those at practice and being ignored, in return, as though she moved through a perpetual veil of invisibility. Which, to some extent, she did, since nobody found her interesting enough to notice.

  She took the stairs down to the basement locker area, where she kept her C.O.R.P. uniform, and ran slap into the ugliest little scene she had witnessed since coming to Vishnu. A gang of POPPA brats, eight or nine of them, had cornered a Granger girl on one of the landings. They were dragging her, hands clamped across her mouth, into the men’s locker room.

  Yalena froze.

  They kept going without looking up the stairs. They hadn’t heard her open the stairwell door. She knew the girl, by sight, at least. Dena Mindel was a freshman, barely turned fifteen. Her parents had just come out from Jefferson, smuggled out, so the gossip ran, by Jefferson’s growing insurrectionist movement. Yalena closed her fingers around the railing, gripping the well-worn wood with an ache through her whole hand. She knew exactly what the sons of POPPA’s leading scions intended to do. They were putting Dena back in her place. Forcibly. You may have gotten off-world, the lesson they were about to impart would tell her and all other refugees, but you’ll never be more than gutter trash. The threat of retribution to family members still trapped on Jefferson would keep her terrified and silent, too.

  Moving very softly, Yalena reascended the stairs and slipped into the equipment room. She picked up a bucket into which she dropped several baseballs, a wooden practice sword used in the martial arts Yalena had studied, and a whole fistful of throwing stars, their edges and points dulled for safety standards, but still dangerous weapons in hands that knew how to use them.

  Yalena’s did.

  She slipped back down the stairwell and glanced swiftly to see if anyone was strolling about. No one was, since the official practice sessions had already begun. She eased her way across the hall. Listened at the closed double doors leading into the men’s locker room. A quick glance through the glass windows in the upper half of the doors told her that they’d posted a guard to run interference and to give a warning, should anyone interrupt. That guard was standing with his back to the doors, intent on whatever was happening around the corner.

  That was his first — and last — mistake.

  Yalena opened the nearest door so softly, he didn’t even hear the faint click. Muffled sounds of pain and terror reached Yalena’s ears. So did low laughter. And other, nastier sounds. Ripping cloth. A meaty smack that wrenched a whimper from the victim. Yalena tried to build a probable map in her mind, giving her a general placement of attackers and attacked. The sound of zippers going down told her she was out of time.

  She held the wooden sword in her left hand, picked up a baseball with her right, then did a swift wind-up and let fly. The hard, leather-covered ball slammed into the side of the lookout’s head, just above the ear. He went down hard. The crack and whump got someone’s attention.

  “What the hell — ?”

  Yalena came around the corner, moving fast. She sent the entire bucketful of baseballs bounding and bouncing in amongst them, tripping them up as they scrambled to tackle her and slipped flat, instead. She hurled throwing stars in a rapid-fire blur, going for vulnerable spots: eyes, throats, naked groins. Half of them went down, cursing or just whimpering. The others rushed her. Or, rather, tried to. She met the first two with full-force blows from her wooden sword. Bone crunched. Screams erupted, strangled with pain and shock.

  She ducked under round-house blows that sailed harmlessly past her and used her attackers’ rushing momentum to propel them into nearby walls, breaking more bones. She moved fluidly, focused on the precise actions needed to cripple the enemy, while keenly attuned to her entire environment. She was aware of everything and everyone around her, even the voices coming down the stairwell outside.

  They were Granger voices, discussing the whereabouts of the girl lying a short meter from Yalena’s feet. They hadn’t reached the bottom of the stairs, yet, when the last would-be rapist still on his feet tried to run the other way. He skidded on a baseball underfoot, and went sprawling to the floor. Yalena stepped across and kicked him in the head, not hard enough to break bone, but more than hard enough to render him incapable of further threat. She stood over him for a long moment, breathing heavily in the midst of the carnage she had wrought, and realized with a stunned feeling that it was over.

  The entire battle had lasted less than sixty seconds.

  Dena had curled up into a ball on the floor, sobbing and shaking. Her dress and underthings had been ripped to shreds. Yalena crouched down beside her, moving swiftly, and wrapped the girl’s shaki
ng fingers around the wooden practice sword. Dena looked up, just long enough to register Yalena’s identity, then heard her friends’ voices in the hallway outside, calling her name. She turned her face toward them, tried to call out, and croaked so softly, even Yalena barely heard her voice.

  “In here!” Yalena shouted, causing Dena to jump in shock. “I’m in here! In the boy’s locker room!”

  Then she took off at a dead run, dodging the remaining baseballs underfoot and whipping through the locker room and showers. She ducked through the doors on the far end, emerging into a corridor that carried Yalena past the wrestling and weight-lifting rooms, up into the main gymnasium, again. She dropped to a carefree stroll across the gym and reached the girls’ locker room via another staircase that mirrored the one she’d just used. That corridor led Yalena down past the trampolines and balance beams used by the women’s gymnastics team.

  Yalena slipped quietly into the girls’ locker room, changed into her C.O.R.P. uniform, and reached the practice field only four minutes late. Once there, however, she found it difficult to concentrate on sensei’s lesson. Her emotions were beginning to catch up to the rest of her, fractured emotions that ran the gamut from icy rage to shaking fear that she’d be expelled — or jailed — when those little bastards woke up and thought about pressing charges. Woven through all of that was the agony of grief she had not yet purged and might never leave behind. Her mother had been murdered by men just as brutal as the gang she’d laid out on the locker room floor.

  Hatred had propelled every single blow.

  If Dena’s friends hadn’t come down the stairwell, would she have stopped? Could she have stopped? She had wanted to kill them. And knew, as well, that she could have. All too easily. The cold, lethal hatred that was shaking through her, now, spoiled her balance and ruined her concentration. Some officer’s candidate I am, she told herself savagely. Dad never mentioned what a good officer’s supposed to do after the fighting’s done. Or what to do when the hatred that makes you want to vomit…